Posted: 03 May 2010 03:28 PM PDT

A scene from Enron at Minerva theatre, Chichester

Anti-American? ... The original British production of Lucy Prebble's Enron (2009). Photograph: Tristram Kenton

You know the cliche about domestic disputes? A man beats his wife, the neighbours call the police, a cop knocks at the door and the victim screams: shove off, none of your business. Sometimes I feel that way about English playwrights who tackle touchy American subjects. It's our dirty laundry; we'll get around to cleaning it. Someday.

Yes, we have much atone for. We're obese and xenophobic and we're poisoning the environment. Doesn't mean you lot have the right to dramatise it. Then along comes Enron, the ingenious and unexpectedly sympathetic docudrama written by Lucy Prebble and directed by Rupert Goold. In February, I lamented the fact that no American had thought of this first. After having seen and thoroughly enjoyed Enron's Broadway incarnation, I'm doubly jealous.

Not everyone feels the same. According to the useful review aggregator StageGrade, New York critics gave Enron a median grade of B, which includes an outright slam from Ben Brantley of the New York Times. Given the disproportionate influence the Times wields in this town, this could mean Goold's production will not earn back its $4m capitalisation and close in a few weeks if the box office doesn't pick up.

Given the hype that preceded Enron, the turn of events is surprising. But then, it should shock no one that British critics raved about the show, which uses expressionistic staging to chronicle the rise and fall of the Texas energy-trading giant. Of course you guys loved it; a bunch of amoral capitalists in Bush's home state bilk shareholders of billions. The house of cards comes crashing down in the shadow of September 11 and the whole mess presages the shady fiscal practices of the subprime bubble that nearly tanked the world economy. And what was our Securities and Exchange Commission doing about it? Wanking to ladyboy porn.

Despite Enron's relevance, its intelligence and its technical bravura, about half the Broadway critics found it either too obvious or too contrived. Brantley barely stifled his yawn over what he dismissed as lack of substance. "[T]his British-born exploration of smoke-and-mirror financial practices isn't much more than smoke and mirrors itself," he sniffed, rather too glibly.

Truthfully, Enron is, in style and content, starkly original by Broadway standards. The use of found text and video, the choreographing of stock-trader gestures to form a dance, the ambitious interweaving of psychological and sociological analysis to create a penetrating critique of a moment in history – all this is sadly rare on the Great White Way. As for lack of substance, the play offers a sweeping analysis of how all progress in human history has taken the form of an economic bubble: slavery, the railroad, the internet. That's not shallow.

I don't think critics were mixed on Enron because they perceived anything anti-American in its depiction of stock-market hucksters Jeffrey Skilling, Andy Fastow and others. I think it's more a case of critics who haven't the aesthetic sophistication to process postmodern dramaturgy or ideological ambiguity. Still, there will always be a market for Yank-bashing. If you're an American author and you want a gig at the Royal Court or buzz in Edinburgh, obey the three V's in portraying Americans: venal, vulgar, violent. You Brits will lap it up.

But here's the wonderful thing about Enron: it doesn't rely on caricature or stereotype. The final 10 minutes of the play are magnificent, as Skilling asserts that he's not really a villain and characterises human progress as the jagged, upward-ascending line of a financial graph. Guess what, he implicitly says about his crimes against economy, we're in it together. When it comes to the elaborate fictions that sustain our global marketplace, everyone's American.

Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Why I’ve given up on the mainstream media: public ... - Crikey

Posted: 03 May 2010 04:54 PM PDT

Dennis Raphael is Professor of Health Policy and Management at York University, Toronto, and co-author of a new report about the social determinants of health, which recently featured on Croakey.

In subsequent email conversations, he mentioned his frustration about the difficulties of attracting media interest to such issues. For better or worse, as we all know, if an issue's not prominent in the headlines, it's unlikely to be high on government agendas.

So I asked if he'd write a piece exploring the reasons behind what he calls the "media blackout".

Here it is:

"While Canada is seen as a world leader in developing health promotion and population health concepts that consider how living conditions shape health, the reality is that Canada has always been a laggard in applying these concepts in the development of public policy. Much of this has to do with the Canadian public's profound lack of awareness which has been abetted by the media's utter unwillingness to address these issues.

For 15 years I have been attempting to have the media in Canada address the broader — or social — determinants of health. My success can be counted on one hand in that a few columnists – not health reporters – have profiled my work on the impact of living conditions and poverty on health.

It was therefore both reassuring – and disturbing – to find that my perceptions of mainstream media coverage were accurate.

Simon Fraser University Health Sciences Professor Michael Hayes and colleagues carried out an extensive analysis of media stories in major Canadian newspapers over an eight year period.[i] Their results were disheartening.

Their analysis of 4732 newspaper articles concerned with health topics found a virtual black-out of stories concerned with the social determinants of health. Only 282 – 6% – newspaper stories were concerned with the socioeconomic environment. More specifically, a total of nine stories (2/10 of one percent) were concerned with how income – the primary social determinant of health – is related to health! There is no reason to think that radio and television coverage is any different.

In a follow-up study, Concordia University communications Professor Michael Gasher and colleagues interviewed twelve Canadian newspaper health reporters about how they went about reporting health stories.[ii]

The barriers to reporting on the social determinants of health as identified by the reporters included: a) lack of knowledge of the social determinants on their part; b) difficulty putting the social determinants into the immediate and concrete "storytelling" that comprises typical news reporting; c) a perception that the social determinants were not new and therefore not newsworthy; and d) concern about "stigmatizing the poor."

That is the "rational" argument put forth by researchers for this media blackout. I offer a path dependency argument.

First, reporters are regular people. Why would we expect that their understandings of the determinants of health – focused on diet, exercise, and tobacco use — would be any different from the general public? For every one Dennis Raphael trying to communicate findings about the social determinants of health, there are at least 150 Mr and Ms fruit and vegetables researchers bombarding them with their stories.

Second, what are the implications for reporters – and their editors and publishers — suddenly pointing out that their last 1000 stories about fruits and vegetables, exercise, and tobacco use as the primary determinants of health were misguided at best and patently wrong at worst. Witness how the media maintains its saturated fat and heart disease fixation in spite of a decade of research disconfirming the link. Ditto for promulgating the fictions concerning PSA tests, weight, and cholesterol.

Third, reporters work for corporations who benefit from having the social determinants of health story kept secret. Most media – including newspapers – are now owned by large corporate entities whose ideologies and values are not consistent with a social determinants of health perspective. Reporters would probably be well aware of this and like most other salaried workers would hesitate to put their futures on the line by consistently presenting a social determinants of health perspective in their stories.

Fourth, newspapers in Canada have huge "Food" and "Living Sections" that generate significant reader interest and advertising dollars in maintain the fiction that life style choices will help readers live long and healthy lives.

I have given up on the mainstream media. I have no illusions that any message I may wish to communicate will be facilitated by it. Even if the odd story makes it into print, it then becomes lost in a continuing barrage of "healthy living" stories.

Set up your own networks. Use Facebook and Twitter. And besides, nobody between the ages of 16 and 30 watches, reads, or listens to the mainstream media anyway."

[i] Hayes, M., et al. (2007). "Telling Stories: News Media, Health Literacy and Public Policy in Canada." Social Science and Medicine, 54, 445-457.

[ii] Gasher, M., et al. (2007). "Spreading The News: Social Determinants of Health Reportage in Canadian Daily Newspapers." Canadian Journal of Communication, 32(3), 557-574.

***

If you didn't seen this already, here is a related post from Fran Baum, professor of public health from Flinders University, who was one of the Commissioners on the 2008 WHO's Commission on the Social Determinants of Health.

Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Angela Carter remembered - Daily Telegraph

Posted: 03 May 2010 01:48 PM PDT

By Kate Webb
Published: 7:00AM BST 03 May 2010

Had Angela Carter lived she would have been 70 this week and it's a fair bet she would have celebrated her birthday with a night at the movies. "I like anything that flickers," she said, finding in cinema's luminescent beings an image of her aesthetic sensibility, which was at war with the essential in art. She was an intellectually knowing writer, as certain of what she was up to as any novelist of her generation, often remarking that her fiction had "a tendency to be telling you something". As she had designs on her readers, making them a participant audience – waiting for the next sleight of hand, the next trick of the light – so, from the beginning, she sensed that film had designs on her: "When I first started going to the cinema intensively in the late Fifties," she wrote, "Hollywood had colonised the imagination of the entire world."

By the Seventies her excursions to the pictures were frequently to London's independent cinemas. She enjoyed visiting these tatty, rundown palaces and was a regular at the Little Bit Ritzy (now The Ritzy) in Brixton when I worked there in the Eighties, coming to see Tarkovsky's The Mirror, among other films. And I remember her talking about a visit to the Electric in Notting Hill Gate, recounting with relish how patrons indulged in acts rather more intimate than the customary necking over popcorn in the back row.

The so-called "art houses" were a lot rowdier then. At the Ritzy, ancient projectors meant that films often broke down during the changeover from reel to reel, and a member of the audience might get up and play rock'n'roll on the clapped-out piano at the side of the stage. It was a time when young people found it possible to live on the dole, work at cash-in-hand jobs and spend their free time writing, painting, making Super 8 movies or, like the drag queens squatting in Railton Road in Brixton, work on the endless task of re-creating oneself.

I bumped into Angela wandering up Railton Road after the riots in 1981, delighted by the carnival spirit that prevailed in its aftermath, when the police temporarily withdrew. Raised in Balham, schooled in Streatham, taking her first job as a reporter on the Croydon Advertiser and later living in Clapham, she wasn't just a tourist: she knew the streets of south London well. When Grace Paley came over from New York and we took her to Brixton market, Angela proudly showed her the best stalls for aki, salt fish and yams.

You can find these places in her swansong, Wise Children: Bard's Road, where the theatrical twins Dora and Nora Chance live, is in reality Shakespeare Road, running off Railton Road, or the Frontline as Brixtonians used to call it before the squats were knocked down or tarted up. In 2008 Lambeth Council named a new street after her, Angela Carter Close – a great "Yah, boo, sucks!" (one of her favourite comebacks) to the Booker judges who never gave her the prize.

From the beginning she wrote in praise of "recycling" and her fictions deploy the tricks of pantomime and music hall, those bawdy and popular arts that gave rise to the cinema (in turn, harking back to magic lanterns, fairy tales and oral storytelling), so she was inevitably drawn to film, a bastard medium based on refashioning the work of others. It appealed to her, too, as a collective art, not reliant on some master author. She was dismissive of post-war French intellectuals who tried in their auteur theory to trash the collectivity of the Hollywood system and raise the director to the status of sole creative genius.

French cinema itself, however, was a significant influence, particularly Godard who underscored the anti-intellectualism of British culture: "When Godard quoted Hegel, Lautréamont, Fanon, we didn't groan. We pricked up our ears." He made her see herself differently. She was not the product of F R Leavis and the welfare state – as Carter and a generation of grammar school children had been told they were – but part of "the great international conspiracy of the disaffected", a child of Marx and Coca-Cola, "Hitchcock, Dostoevsky, Brecht – and of pulp fiction, phenomenology and the class struggle. Heady stuff, that changes you."

Her favourite film was Marcel Carné's Les enfants du paradis: "It is the definitive film about romanticism… in which it always seems possible to jump through the screen… and live there, in a state of luminous anguish." This fantasy of crossing over – and cinema's state of longing, its ingrained nostalgia for somewhere else – is explored in Carter's novel The Passion of New Eve and her short story "The Merchant of Shadows", which celebrate and query Hollywood's faking of femininity: "Enigma. Illusion. Woman? And all you signified was false!"

What would Carter make today of the androgynous beauty of Cillian Murphy in Breakfast on Pluto or Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry? No doubt she'd have some new angle on it all, but as one obituarist lamented: "She will never have the chance to shock us at 70." She is not here to deliver her smart commentaries, so we must do the best we can by continuing to read this most undeceived of writers, attending to her iconoclasm, wit and wild imagination.

Angela Carter was born on May 7 1940 and died on February 16 1992. Kate Webb is a freelance writer

Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Fiction

Senin, 03 Mei 2010

“Why doesn't Broadway love Enron? - The Guardian” plus 2 more

“Why doesn't Broadway love Enron? - The Guardian” plus 2 more

0 komentar:

Posting Komentar

Arsip Blog

Feedjit